A few days ago there appeared Persepolis 2.0, a mashup of the original graphic novel and the recent election protests in Iran written from the opposition viewpoint. What would it have looked like if the authors had supported the incumbent regime?

1. Fry bacon over medium heat. Remove bacon and set aside.
2. Place bread slice in pan to absorb half of fat and set aside.
3. Place second bread slice in pan to absorb remaining fat.
4. Add cheese slice and cover for a few seconds to promote melting.
5. Add bacon and second cheese slice and cover for a few seconds.
6. Place first bread slice on top with greasy side up to make sandwich.
7. Turn sandwich to brown both sides and remove from heat.
8. Advise paramedics before enjoying.

I was disappointed when I read the OS X 10.5.7 news and found no mention of the missing video card selector. The wording here was not promising:

Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.

But after I installed the 10.5.7 update I found the new option right where it belongs, in the Energy Saver preference panel, shown here:

Hey Apple, you should have included this in an OS X update before shipping the hardware. But it’s too late to argue. My biggest gripe about the 17-inch is now moot.

The first thing you did wrong was to pick a margin so greedy as to be unjustifiable. Many consumers know or at least feel that half a dollar is too much to pay for a gigabyte of network traffic. Moderately savvy consumers would complain if rates were more than a few cents per gigabyte.

The second thing you did wrong was to try to profit most on the subscribers most likely to feel the inequity. The more bandwidth a person uses, the more likely they can understand their own usage habits in terms of gigabytes; the more likely they have a reality-based idea of the costs; the more likely they are to voice their righteous complaints publicly, educate other consumers, and threaten to subscribe elsewhere.

Many of them also know that they are good customers; they don’t consume your low-value, high-cost call center or web portal resources, they just want cheap, reliable bandwidth. These are the very people you should have favored when crafting your rate plans. Instead you underestimated and insulted them. Now they are clamoring to the competition, it is time to show them consideration. Whatever rate you settle on, it well be easier to swallow because it involves a concession. It was wise of you to test high rates on small markets.

The trump card that allows free consumers to demand a fair deal is the ability to decline the deal. Are consumers free if they believe your service is a necessity of life? Assuming people need your service, you can get away with outrageous rates if the competition colludes rather than competes. This would leave an opening in the market for low-rate providers if you hadn’t already locked it shut by lobbying for fixed-cost regulations that only established providers can afford. You’re pretty smart after all.

Let’s limit our attention to one application—any application—at any time. Let’s make it easy to change focus when we have to. Let’s allow ourselves to bring other apps up quickly if we need them, but put them out of sight again just as quickly.

Let’s rediscover how to focus, and get back to thinking.

Think helps you concentrate on a subset of your visible applications in Mac OS X. Think is a contrast knob for your brain. Think is free.

Vanish distraction.

When you “illuminate” an app, everything else pops behind a full-screen mask consisting of any solid or transparent color you like. It could be prettier, smoother, more capable, and more configurable, but I love it. Its three hot keys are easy to learn and it works well with Quicksilver. And unlike “Hide Others” (command+option+H) Think also hides my desktop icons and wallpaper.

I’m no Tony Robbins myself but I dread sitting on conference center chairs while geeks practice their public speaking on me. Last year I spared myself half the misery by sticking my face in a laptop. This year I am sparing myself the whole misery by keeping my butt out of conference center chairs altogether. Theater seating is ten times more comfortable and there is good service.

SXSW Interactive is a well-built structure. It provides a definite time and place where dense social networking is encouraged in many forms but it guarantees nothing. The panel schedule is a gamble akin to playing roulette. Some panels are unforgettably good. Even so, many veterans will report and I agree that most of the best events do not appear on the schedule and many are not even restricted to badge holders.

Still, I like to have a badge with Interactive privileges. I maintain hope that smarter people than myself will fill me with knowledge and inspiration. So far I am satisfied with the interactions I have shared with people face-to-face. I am having a good time this week and nothing would spoil that faster than an hour on a stiff seat in a darkened room wishing I were anywhere else.

I wanted to give it a chance. I studied the schedule but nothing grabbed me and pulled me in. It occurred to me that I should at least attend my favorite panel but it’s not on the schedule this year. My heart sank.

Surely there are others who have felt this way. I know some who stopped attending because the strain outweighed the value. I know this about myself: experiences that echo the boredom that pervaded my educational career can also summon the discontent that was my reaction to that boredom. The similarity between a panel schedule and a day in the life of myself as a high school student is enough to commence the dark reverberations.

I also know that my moods and tastes are subject to change without notice. It would not surprise me to find myself excited about panels in the future. Nor would it to learn that my attitude had been soured by a temporary condition elsewhere in my life. Surely others have recovered from similar downswings.

Unless and until I am drawn to an Interactive event, I am thankful that my SXSW Gold badge includes Film. If you need me, look for me comparing schedule grids at the Iron Cactus. Or I’ll be working at home face-to-face with visiting coworkers. It makes me extra glad to live in Austin.

Thing in a Place 1

The credit for this switch belongs entirely to the lovely erlang-mode. (I tried TextMate’s erlang mode but I couldn’t get past TextMate’s strange navigation keys, etc. I wish there were standard navigation keys in OS X. Too bad. I’ve heard TextMate is great.) The emacs erlang-mode helps me write beautiful code. Now that I’m also learning to use emacs in php-mode I rarely become disoriented and type “:w” to save a file. (I don’t miss vim.)

Not everything about emacs is perfect. It doesn’t understand my Mac’s right-delete key. Left-delete (backspace) won’t delete a tab; it converts it the tab spaces and deletes one of them so that I have to hit backspace many times to delete a single tab. And in php-mode, the indentation rules are far more complex than the WordPress coding standards; I just want tabs in php-mode.

Even though I have these problems, you have to hand it to emacs for being customizable. It took a couple of hours to find all the solutions, but I solved all of the above problems above by adding these lines to my .emacs file:

;; Map OS X Terminal SSH delete key
(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "ESC [ 3 ~") 'delete-char)

;; Backspace should delete, not convert tabs to spaces
(setq c-backspace-function 'backward-delete-char)

;; In PHP, never indent; always insert TAB.
(require 'php-mode)
(defun my-php-mode-hook ()
  (local-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command))
(add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'my-php-mode-hook)

This works for me even though I understand less than half of it. There is so much to learn.